Girl uses first aid method learned from 'Hunger Games' to save friend

Matthew Diebel , USATODAY , TEGNA2:35 PM. EDT June 12, 2017

A worker swaps out the billboard marking the opening of 'The Hunger Games" March 22, 2012 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York. The science fiction action-drama film is based on the novel by Suzanne Collins. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT/Getty Images (Photo: DON EMMERT, 2012 AFP)

Sometimes it pays to play close attention to what you read, even in fantasy books.

That's what a group of preteen Massachusetts girls found out when one of them, 12-year-old Megan Gething, used a tourniquet method she had learned from reading The Hunger Games to save a friend from possibly bleeding to death.

According to the Gloucester Times, the girls were playing in marshland near their Rockport homes when Mackenzie George, also 12, slipped against a metal pump and cut her leg open, leaving a 10-inch long, 3-inch wide gash, gushing with blood.

"I didn’t feel anything,” George told the paper of the June 3 incident. “I thought I just bumped my leg, but when I pulled it up, I saw the cut and I started screaming to call 911.”

That’s when Gething, remembering a scene from the The Hunger Games, which became a blockbuster movie in 2008, jumped into action and tied a pair of shorts around her friend’s leg to stanch the blood flow.

"I figured it was a well-known method of stopping bleeding," she said.

Meanwhile, she told the Times, she asked another girl, Zoe Tallgrass, to run for help. "Going through my mind was just helping 'Kenzie," she said.

Tallgrass returned in about three minutes, Gething said, with her father and brother, who carried the injured girl to their backyard to wait for an ambulance to take her to hospital.

According to the Times, the eight middle-schoolers had just spent that Friday night at the Tallgrass house to celebrate Zoe’s birthday and decided to play in the marsh before their parents picked them up on Saturday morning.

The incident occurred when George tried to fetch a pair of shoes that had been left on the side of the marsh. “I tried to get them and slid on the muddy part, and embedded on the side was a piece of metal and I split my leg open," she said.

The girl was transferred to Boston Children's Hospital where surgery was performed. A full recovery is expected.